The most powerful politician in Bulgaria, Washington’s newest
ally in the global war on terror, is a close associate of known
mobsters and linked to almost 30 unsolved murders in the Black
Sea republic, according to a confidential risk-analysis
investigation of of the country commissioned by a private bank.

The U.S. partnership with Boyko Borissov, 48, a popular former
interior minister now poised to capture Bulgaria’s presidency,
is the latest example of the political trade-offs involved in
the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism, which has put
the Pentagon, CIA and FBI in bed with some of the world’s most
corrupt and thuggish leaders.

Borissov, former body guard to both the last communist dictator
and his post-communist successor before being appointed chief
secretary of the interior ministry in 2001, claimed a major role
last year in having the FBI open an office in Sofia, the
capital.

A karate fanatic — a one-time coach of the Bulgarian national
team — whose signature attire is a black leather jacket,
Borissov was also a major player in last year’s deal with the
Bush administration to base U.S. air, naval and army forces in
Bulgaria, a potential staging ground for an attack on Iran,
about 800 miles east across the Black Sea.

Borissov, who encourages comparisons to Arnold Schwarzenegger,
shed the interior ministry last year to become the immensely
popular, high profile mayor of Sophia, and there is little doubt
in Bulgaria he is maneuvering to take control of the government
in the 2009 elections.

But according to a 3-inch thick confidential dossier compiled by
a team of former top U.S. law enforcement officials on behalf of
a Swiss financial house, Borissov is also considered “a business
partner and former associate of some of the biggest mobsters in
Bulgaria.”

The 18-month-old report was obtained on condition that the bank
and its investigators not be identified.

During a four-year term as interior minister during 2001-2005,
the report suggests, Borissov used his responsibility for
policing official corruption to help mob associates wipe out
their underworld competition.

“Since Boyko Borissov was appointed chief secretary of the
interior ministry in 2001 . . . there have been a large number
of assassinations and mob-style killings of persons identified
with criminal groupings in Bulgaria,” the report says.

“None of these killings have been solved. Many investigations
reportedly led by Borissov have been closed without results or
explanations,” the report says.

The report amasses details on the connections of IPON,
Borissov’s private security company, and its allegedly close
relations with the criminal group known as SIK.

(Neither IPON nor SIK could be rendered into English by the
press section of Bulgaria’s Washington embassy.)

“Borissov has a documented history of business affiliations with
persons who are alleged to be the top leaders of organized crime
in Bulgaria,” says the report, which includes detailed profiles
of suspected criminal associates of Borissov and 28 unsolved
“assassinations” under his watch.

“During Borissov’s reign as chief law enforcement officer only
low-level, inconsequential mobsters are brought to justice while
his former business partners thrive, and their alleged
competitors are systematically murdered,” the report says,
citing widespread Bulgarian media reports.

The bank investigators concluded that Borissov’s alleged mob
ties should prompt “extreme caution on the part of U.S. law
enforcement agencies that are responsible for liaison and
information exchange with Bulgaria.”
EU Probes

Investigators for the European Union have come to similar
conclusions—but cited five times the number of mob-style
killings as the private report.

In May 2006, E.U. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told the
European Parliament that there had been “very few investigations
and prosecutions” of criminal gangs in Bulgaria.

“There have been over 150 contract killings linked to organized
crime since 2000 and not one conviction,” E.U. investigators
said in their report.

Eight months later, top Bulgarian police officials called a
press conference to announce that trafficking in heroin, a main
source of the violence and corruption, had been wiped out.

“Bulgaria is no longer used as a main drug trafficking channel,
the head of the country’s special unit for fighting against
organized crime said Tuesday,” according to the Feb. 6, 2007,
report from the Sofia news agency Novinite.com, without
attributing the statement to any one of the three particular
police officials at the press conference.

Bulgaria’s Washington embassy referred questions on Borissov to
the mayor’s office in Sofia, which did not respond to two
detailed questionnaires.

But Klaus Jansen, a German investigator dispatched by the E.U.
to look into Bulgaria’s progress, said he encountered a “kiss my
ass” attitude whenever he tried to probe officials about
reforms.

“They believed they would get into the E.U. anyway,” Jansen told
the Financial Times. “There is no positive pressure that you can
put on them.”

Indeed, Bulgaria was admitted to the E.U. in January. In 2004 it
was admitted to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
or NATO, and promptly dispatched 400 troops to Iraq.

According to some reports last year, Bulgaria has hosted one of
the CIA’s secret counterterrorism detention centers, which
experts say would have directly involved Borissov as interior
minister, but the Sofia government denied the reports.

“Bulgaria’s most popular politician,” according to one account,
Borissov recently formed formed a new, right-wing populist party
and—with an 80 per cent approval rating—is primed to become
prime minister.

“One thing is certain . . .” wrote a Bulgarian analyst,
surveying the political landscape, “Borissov is, and will be,
the strong one.”
Close to U.S. Intelligence

“Boyko Borissov is a flamboyant character who appears frequently
in the Bulgarian press characterizing himself as Bulgaria’s eyes
and ears of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
U.S. Secret Service,” said the private investigators’ report.
“The Bulgarian public are said to pay Borissov great deference
because he is reported to be close to the FBI, Secret Service
and Interpol.”

Borissov’s May 2006 visit to Washington, where he met with
senior CIA and State Department officials, seemed to confirm
that.

John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director who was involved
in the new security arrangements with Bulgaria, said he did not
remember meeting specifically with Borissov, but counseled
patience with the former Soviet bloc state.

“They are interesting people, who want to be helpful — and they
are,” McLaughlin said in an interview. “They are still finding
their way in the world after decades of subordination to the old
USSR. It will take a while longer.”

But the new alliance may have already paid a counterterrorism
dividend.

Two months after Borissov’s visit, Bulgaria intercepted a truck
filled with radioactive material destined for Iran, according to
a July 23, 2006, report by the French news agency AFP.

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., who said he “truly fell in love” with
Bulgaria when he was an election monitor there in the 1990s —
and subsequently created the congressional Bulgaria Caucus,
applauds the new alliance.

“A good relationship with Bulgaria is crucial,” he said in a
recent phone interview, “because Bulgaria is strategically
located in southeast Europe.”
Other Bases

A Bulgarian news agency reported recently that U.S. stealth
bombers and cruise missiles would be launched at Iran from
Bulgaria in April.

But Wilson said he didn’t believe the U.S. established bases in
Bulgaria to stage attacks on Iran.

“We have bases closer to Iran and aircraft carriers (in the
Persian Gulf),” he pointed out.

Wilson also said Bulgaria “had made progress” on corruption,
pointing to its admission to the E.U.

But a former top FBI official deplored the Bush administration’s
embrace of Bulgaria, and by extension, Borissov, as a
counterterrorism ally.

“Borissov has probably gone a long way to clean himself up,”
said the former official, who requested anonymity, “and my
opinion is that he was much more vulnerable to criticism in 2005
than he is today.”

But he added, “the U.S. government made a terrible choice in who
to go to bed with in Bulgaria.

“What the hell — we seem to take help from anyone, however
dirty, in the ‘war on terror.’ ”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

“Shays, Christopher Shays”: Did 10-term Connecticut Republican
Rep. Christopher Shays yearn to be a spy when he graduated from
Principia (a liberal arts college near St. Louis, Mo.) in 1968?

Sounds like it. During a Feb. 14 hearing of a House Homeland
Security subcommittee, Shays and DHS intelligence chief Charlie
Allen were commiserating over how long it still takes to clear
applicants for intelligence work.

“ I think it is a real problem,” Allen said. “For new people,
out of universities, they may have done things, like I did in
college, and perhaps you did too, sir, but the education process
is slow and painful. We’ve —”

“I tried to get into the CIA,” Shays cut in, “and I did not
qualify. I’ll leave it at that.”

Iraq and Roll: A critic’s blunt-force attack here last week on a
study showing a dramatic rise in global terrorism since the U.S.
invasion of Iraq drew a sharp retort from one its authors, Paul
Cruickshank, a fellow at NYU’s Center on Law and Security.

Here are excerpts from his e-mail to SpyTalk.

“Robert Dreyfuss last week called our figures on the rate of
jihadist terrorism before and after the Iraq war ‘absurd
statistically.’ More specifically he claimed that our finding of
a 25 percent increase in attacks on Western targets ‘bordered on
the deceitful’ because such attacks rose from 7.2 to 9.0 a year,
only an increase in 1.8 attacks per year. . .

“Al Qaeda has not let the Iraq war divert it from attacking the
United States and her allies. We certainly found it significant
that despite being on the ropes in 2002, al Qaeda and its
affiliates were able to step up the pace of anti-Western attacks
after the Iraq war.

“And attacks outside Iraq and Afghanistan by Al Qaeda and groups
of similar ideology have gone up from 27.6 to 37 per year, which
corresponds to 10 more attacks a year than before the Iraq war,
pretty strong evidence we feel for an upward trend in attacks
after March 2003.”

Cruickshank took note of Dreyfuss’ contention that the Bush
administration’s 2006 National Intelligence Estimate hyped the
terrorist threat to draw attention away from the miseries of
Iraq.

“If the war in Iraq is producing hundreds, or thousands, or
millions of recruits for Osama bin Laden, well, where are they?”
Dreyfuss wrote for TomPaine.com last September “Al-Qaeda’s
organization has been devastated. Since 9/11, there have been
zero incidents of terrorism within the United States, and only a
tiny handful in Western Europe.”

Cruickshank’s response: “Our study suggests a rather different
reality. Terrorist groups sharing al Qaeda’s worldview have
conducted seven times more attacks a year in the period after
the Iraq war than the period before. Outside of Iraq and
Afghanistan, the most dramatic rise of jihadist terrorism has
been in the Arab world — a 445 percent increase in the rate of
fatal attacks and a 783 percent increase in the rate of
fatalities since the Iraq war...

“And just last summer British and American intelligence services
broke up an al Qaeda plot to target airliners bound to the U.S.
from Heathrow in a plot that could have killed thousands.”

Soft Intelligence: One of our favorite iconoclasts, global
thinker William S. Lind, has last week offered some pungent
observations on U.S. intelligence, military and otherwise.

“It has become fashionable in Washington to regard military
intelligence as ‘hard data.’ ” Lind observed recently for the
conservative Free Congress Foundation (www.freecongress.org).

“Nothing could be further from the truth. As ‘data,’ most
military intelligence is as soft as the Pillsbury Doughboy....”
wrote Lind, who in previous lives was a military expert for both
Republican Sen. RobertTaft, Jr. of Ohio and Democrat Gary Hart
of Colorado, among other things.

“Our approach, the wrong one, is to seek ever-increasing amounts
of ‘information’,” Lind continued. “That information is funneled
into various intelligence ‘functions’ and ‘fusion centers,’
almost all of them remote from the fight, where the intel
weenies sit around in their purple robes embroidered with moons
and stars. . . . They wave their wands . . . and presto!, out
comes — well, for the most part, crap.

“Regrettably . . . the crap cannot be acknowledged as such,”
Lind observes. “The motto is, ‘Garbage In, Gospel Out.’ So the
crap runs downhill to the battalions, companies, platoons and
squads, where the difference between what intel is telling them
and what they are seeing with their own eyes becomes the ‘user’s
problem.’ ”
SPYTALK BOOKS

Perle Necklace: Alan Weisman, a veteran network news producer
with CBS News, 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose, has been inked to
write “Prince of Darkness — Richard Perle: The Kingdom, The
Power, and the End of Empire in America,” for Sterling
Publishing’s new imprint, Union Square Press. . . “Perle has
granted the author extraordinary access, with multiple
one-on-one interviews,” the publisher says.